A group of CXOs and I were thinking about the future recently and started pondering this question: What will the role of the CIO be in 2030? To answer this question, we have to make some forecasts regarding what the social, political, economic and technological environment will look like.

What people are saying about 2030

Do a search of the term “2030” and the results will span a spectrum of macro and micro issues (the x-axis) and attitudes (the y-axis), ranging from utopian to dystopian. They all will tend to reflect the current concerns and agendas of insulated and isolated elites.

Not immediately forthcoming is what the role of the CIO will be in 2030. This is not a question you will be able to answer with a Google search.

CIO role changes when technology becomes ubiquitous

The CIO at one of America’s most prestigious institutions of higher learning, addressing an audience of over 160 no-nonsense, “I have things to do today” CXOs recently, provocatively suggesting that we are living in the best of times technologically.

He recalled that in the mid-1980s, ahead-of-the-curve CIOs told their organizations, “Trust me. There will come a time when everybody in the enterprise will have the technology kit they need, and it is going to be dirt cheap and really reliable. That is going to be nirvana. I am going to help you get to that place.”

They were right. We are living in an age of cheap, reliable and readily accessible technology. The muggles — the non-IT professionals in the enterprise — don’t need us to buy technology. They don’t need us to deploy technology.

But they do need us to create a curated buffet of technology options. They do need us to sculpt (à laCass Sunstein’s Nudge) a technology decision-making process that makes it easy to do the right thing. They do need us to euthanize with minimal disruption legacy systems. They do need us to integrate new tech with current tech.

The problem is that they can start to feel autonomous in the technology sphere and not recognize that they need IT professionals to extract full value from an exponentially expanding technology choice set.

The danger, as that higher-ed Cassandra opined, is that CIOs will not correct that misperception — will not materially intervene in the current flow of their career trajectory — and, come 2030 or so, will find themselves essential but not strategic.

Essential but not strategic?

Are you wondering whether something that is essential can not be strategic? Well, if the CIO’s role is just to make sure that everything is running, what is the difference between the CIO and the guy in charge of the air conditioning? I mean no offense to the hard-working professionals who design, manage and operate air conditioning systems, but there is no such thing as great air conditioning. Either it works or it doesn’t, and if it doesn’t, the guy in charge of it is gone. In the overheated and globally warmed climate of 2030, you will absolutely need to have air conditioning. Similarly, in a totally chipped, omni-surveilled, algorithmically analyzed 2030, you’ve got to have IT.

A world where IT is perceived as essential but not strategic is an ugly place to be. If IT is not up and running, you will be fired, but there is no upside to being great. IT just has to work. It has become air conditioning.

Meyer’s vision has come to pass. As one of the CXOs pondering the role of the CIO in 2030 noted, resources have become commoditized and workloads have become fungible. It is now possible to purchase compute capability on a "spot" or "spot block" basis. In 2030, IT will operate a “trading desk” for computational resources.